Daughter of the count of Provence and wife of Henry III, one of four sisters who all became queens. Unpopular in London for her foreign kin, she raised an army for her husband in the Barons' War and shaped the upbringing of Edward I.
Eleanor of Provence was queen of England from 1236 to 1272 as the wife of Henry III. She was one of the four daughters of Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Provence who all married kings: her sister Margaret married Louis IX of France, Sanchia married Henry's brother Richard of Cornwall, later king of the Romans, and Beatrice married Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily.
Her time as queen was politically active and often unpopular. Her Savoyard uncles and the Provençal followers who came with her were rewarded with English lands and offices, and Londoners came to see her as the face of a foreign court. In the Barons' War she worked from France to raise an army for Henry against Simon de Montfort, and she remained a formidable influence on her son, Edward I.
Eleanor was born around 1223, probably at Aix, to Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Provence, and Beatrice of Savoy. The Provençal court was a centre of troubadour poetry, and she grew up in its literary culture. Her marriage was negotiated through her mother's Savoyard family, and she married Henry III at Canterbury Cathedral on 14 January 1236, aged about twelve, and was crowned at Westminster six days later in a ceremony that Matthew Paris described in detail.
Matthew Paris, the St Albans chronicler who knew the court, was hostile to the foreigners around the queen and blamed her kin for draining the kingdom's wealth, but he also depicted her as pious and devoted to her husband and children. Her surviving letters show a queen who pursued her rights and her children's interests with persistence, above all her dower lands and the marriages of her daughters.
Her unpopularity in London was real. In July 1263, as she tried to travel by barge from the Tower to Windsor, Londoners on London Bridge pelted her with stones, mud and rubbish and forced her to turn back, an insult her son never forgot. Modern historians, notably Margaret Howell, have revised the old image of a grasping foreign queen into that of a capable political actor who defended the crown through its worst crisis.
Eleanor's uncles became powerful in England. Peter of Savoy received the honour of Richmond and built the Savoy Palace on the Strand, and Boniface of Savoy was elected archbishop of Canterbury in 1241. Resentment of the Savoyards, and later of Henry's Lusignan half-brothers, fed the baronial reform movement of 1258, though Eleanor and the Lusignans were bitter rivals. When Henry went to Gascony in 1253 she governed England as regent with Richard of Cornwall, and in 1254 the regents summoned knights from the shires to grant aid for the king.
Her children were the centre of her politics. She dominated the household of her eldest son, Edward, in his youth, took part in the negotiations that brought him a Castilian bride, Eleanor of Castile, and married her daughter Margaret to Alexander III of Scotland. The complaints of barons about her influence over the heir show how much weight she carried.
When civil war broke out in 1264, Eleanor was in France. With Louis IX's support she gathered ships and mercenaries on the Flemish coast to invade England and free Henry and Edward, who had been captured at Lewes in May 1264; she pawned her jewels to pay for them and pressed the pope to excommunicate the rebels. Contrary winds and a lack of money kept the fleet in port, but her pressure helped isolate Simon de Montfort, and after his death at the Battle of Evesham in August 1265 she returned to England.
After Henry's death in 1272 Eleanor lived as queen mother, and in 1286 she took the veil at the abbey of Amesbury in Wiltshire, where two of her granddaughters were already nuns. She died there on 24 or 25 June 1291 and was buried at Amesbury; her heart was carried to the church of the Franciscans in London.